


take ahold of it together.

by lovelyorbent



Series: character studies. [3]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Cancer, Character Study, Gen, High Heels, Infertility, Mild Sexual Content, pretentious metaphors, some Gender Dysmorphia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-06
Packaged: 2018-03-16 13:26:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3489902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelyorbent/pseuds/lovelyorbent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>cherno alpha's dynamic duo, from moscow to hong kong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	take ahold of it together.

**Author's Note:**

> i really enjoy writing these character studies. this one got a little long because i was covering two people.
> 
> title comes from the russian proverb meaning 'take ahold of it together, it won't feel heavy.'

Sasha’s second name is not Kaidonovskya when she is born.

That does not matter.

It ought to have been.

 

As a very young boy, with seven loud older brothers and sisters, Aleksis Kaidonovsky learns this: nobody ever looks at you twice if you are quiet, as long as you are otherwise unremarkable.  And if nobody ever looks at you twice, nobody will ever know what you are thinking. And if nobody knows what you are thinking then you have the upper hand.

When you have five older brothers, you need to be able to get the upper hand sometimes. His sisters, twins, are less prone to violence, but it’s good to have his silence about him with them, too.

Girls, they’re dangerous.

His father tells him this, then kisses his mother.

Aleksis thinks putting your tongue between the teeth of a dangerous thing must be the bravest thing he has ever seen.

 

Moscow is cold in the middle of February, and Aleksandra at thirteen is sitting on a bench waiting for an unreliable bus to come, with a coat wrapped around her and wind sweeping her hair, which falls to her waist, around her face, blinding her.  It’s fine and biddable and platinum blonde and her father braids it sometimes when he needs something to do with his hands and he has run out of cigarettes and alcohol.

This is the only reason she does not cut it all off.

 

Aleksis is fifteen and there is a beautiful girl sitting on a bus stop bench in the cold, but his house is three doors down and it is freezing and windy, so he leaves her there and goes inside.

 

She is short. So she learns to walk in heels, because being short doesn’t suit her.  “These are shoes for sluts,” her father tells her when he sees her practicing in them, tall black things with razor points.

She doesn’t say anything to him.  But she wishes she had, when she thinks about it years later.  Wishes she had smiled with a mouth full of sharp teeth and said, _Then I’ll be sure to use them to walk over the balls of the first man who calls me slut_.

Her father does not need to have any more children anyway.

 

It’s summer in Moscow and the girl at the bus stop is back, not for the first time, but for the first time since he has taken the time to notice her again.

She is wearing black shoes with heels so sharp they could pierce a glass Christmas ornament and not shatter it.  That makes him smile, especially when she stands up smoothly and shows that she is five foot nothing without them, and then again especially when she gets on the bus without a hitch in her walk, all fluidity.

Girls like this, they’re dangerous.

He thinks he would risk his tongue.

 

The first time a man tries to touch her it’s the middle of the night on the streets of Moscow and she punches him so hard in the stomach that he vomits, then runs away down the street on her heels, passes the bus stop because the buses aren’t running anymore and goes straight home.  Her feet bleed and she keeps running, pretending she isn’t terrified.

Her father is passed out on the couch, a bottle dangling from his fingers.  She takes it from him and pours the rest of it down the sink, then puts it carefully on the floor under his hand so he won’t know what she’s done.

Then she goes to sleep. The vomit on her clothes, in the hamper, makes the room smell, but it smells like a decision she would make again.

 

Aleksis is nearly sixteen and he is six feet tall.  Two of his brothers he passed a long time ago, and his sisters.  And he is neck and neck with his next oldest brother, Nicolay. And he is still growing. The year he turns sixteen he grows seven more inches and gains stubble on his face that he can’t get rid of, even when he shaves twice a day.

Two of his brothers, the two oldest, Mikhail and Iosif, taunt him for his silence, call him stupid, and he is winning the ensuing fistfight when his other brothers join in, on neither team but simply throwing punches.

After that, he loses.

 

Aleksandra becomes tall in the way some people do: very quickly.

But she wears her heels anyway.  Even though her friends say the boys won’t like it.  Even though she’s taller now by half a head than most of the boys, when she wears them.

Fuck the boys. She likes the way her shoes make her feel.

 

The girl at the bus stop is tall and thin in the fall of Aleksis’ year of being sixteen. But she’s still wearing those heels. He almost walks up to her and tells her how they make her legs look a mile long.  Almost.

But then Nicolay catches him looking and teases him relentlessly about it for weeks, and he has to pretend he wasn’t looking.

So he doesn’t ask.

 

Aleksandra doesn’t do well in school.

It isn’t that she’s not smart. But what she’s learning isn’t what she wants to learn.  Isn’t what’s important to her.

She doesn’t know what _is_ important to her yet, but it isn’t this.  So she fails with a sharp grin and her hair tied back into a long blonde ponytail, swaying at her back as she walks.

Here is what school teaches her: do not trust authority so blindly you cannot see when they lead you astray.

 

Aleksis watches the girl at the bus stop walk up to it the same way she does every day—at a different time every day, but he knows that now too.  It is four o’clock on a Monday and here she is.

He still doesn’t tell her how good her legs look.  Or that the fact that she is filling out in curves has been driving him to distraction for months.

But she can tell he’s thinking it. Meets his eyes, steadily. Calls, across the street, “You look so much every day, I am beginning to wonder if you know how to speak!”

“You look like you were made to look at.”

“I wasn’t. Go look at somebody else.”

He doesn’t want to look at anybody else.

 

Aleksandra takes a girl to bed long before she ever takes a boy.  Not because she thinks men are dangerous or she wants to rebel, but because girls are pretty and she doesn’t really feel like dick right now.

In the bedroom she takes the heels off.

She doesn’t need to be dangerous today; she wants to be soft.

She can be anything she wants to be, depending on what face she puts on that morning.

 

Aleksis sits down beside the girl at the bus stop and doesn’t say anything, but she looks up at him with one eyebrow raised—and she looks supremely in control with that expression—and says, “Are you here to look again?”

“No,” he replies. “I’m here to talk.”

“Face that way,” she says, pointing away from her, and he does, shifts on the bench so his back is to her. “Now you can talk to me.”

“What’s your name?” he asks.

“Aleksandra,” she tells him.

The bus pulls up, and when he turns to ask for her number, she’s already gone.

 

Aleksandra’s father finally drinks himself to death when she is sixteen.  It’s not as sad for her as it probably should be; she loves the old man but he’s sort of a bastard and he’s never really taken care of her the way a father does a daughter, it’s always been the other way around.

She drops out of school. She gets a job. She can’t afford bus money anymore, so she walks.

She wears her heels to the funeral with lipstick so red she knows her father would have frowned at it.

 

Aleksandra doesn’t come to the bus stop anymore.

He tries not to let it bother him, but it does.  Jekatrina and Mariya mock him a little for it and he’s quiet, as he always is, and eventually they leave him alone, because teasing is no fun when you get no reaction.

 

She joins the _militsya_ when she’s seventeen, because she has to rather than because she takes any particular joy in being an authority figure. She can be an authority figure without stars on her shoulders.  But she can’t afford to live by herself and this way the state provides for her while she trains.

It’s a marriage of necessity, but she’s good at it.  She shaves her hair on one side and cuts the rest of it short.  Wears her bright red lipstick and draws sharp points in her eyeliner and kisses the gun she’s learning how to fire on the barrel for good luck before she plugs five out of six shots in the tight innermost ring of the target.

But five out of six isn’t the best she can do.  So she reloads.

Kisses the barrel again.

Gets six out of six.

 

Aleksis tries to forget about Aleksandra. There are other girls, and when he tops out at seven feet tall, with dark hair and a handsome enough face, attracting them isn’t a problem.

But then he sees her again, wearing the uniform of a trainee of the Military Police, walking down the street in heavy boots instead of her usual heels.  Her hair is shorn short, but still, he would recognize her anywhere.

He doesn’t talk to her.

But he joins the _militsya_ when he gets out of school two months later.

For no particular reason whatsoever.

 

The boy from the bus stop is in the recruitment office, signing his name on the papers. When he walks out, she walks out after him, reaches up to grab him by the shoulder, because he must be more than a foot taller than her—and she, at five foot ten inches, is not accustomed to having to look up when talking to people.  “Cadet!” she says because she doesn’t know his name, and he turns and briefly grins as he recognizes her, then closes his eyes.

“Aleksandra.”

His eyes are still closed.

“What’s your name?”

“Can I look at you this time when I tell you?”

She drops her hand and crosses her arms over her chest, looking at him emotionlessly until he finally just opens his eyes.

“Aleksis Kaidonovsky,” he says, and now it’s his turn to walk away.

 

She graduates her class with the rank of private, no stars on her shoulders.  Aleksis turns up for the ceremony, which is short and efficient, and sits silently in the back, knowing he is conspicuous for his size.

“Aleksandrina,” he says afterwards when she walks by him.  “You did well.”

“I know,” she replies, “Cadet.”

“Aleksis,” he reminds her, “Kaidonovsky.”

“Aleksis Kaidonovsky,” she repeats, then one corner of her red mouth curls upwards and she looks at him with some mirth in her eyes.  “If you graduate next year maybe I’ll let you take me out to dinner.”

“If I graduate _this_ year you can pay,” he counters.

She pauses, lifts one eyebrow slowly, then shrugs, as if to say _I’ll take it_ , turns around, and continues down the hallway.  When she walks like she knows where she’s going it’s easy to forget she’s only seventeen.

 

Aleksandra knows he only joined four months behind her, so she knows he’ll be graduating by next year at the latest, unless he’s totally useless.  And if he’s totally useless, he’s not worth her time.

Eh, what can she say? She likes her men big. Not for any of the cruder reasons, but because that way at least they match.  Maybe for some of the cruder reasons too, but she doesn’t have to love the boy, she only has to take him to dinner.

He graduates within the year, and only because she’s watching his face does she catch his wink. “You owe me something, _krasavitsa_.”

She doesn’t like his tone. “I don’t owe you anything.”

“We had a deal.”

“Deals can be broken. You’re entitled, _Private_.”  She curls the last word off her tongue very deliberately to draw his eyes to her lips. “Pick me up at 1900 tomorrow in front of the station, and keep your hands to yourself.”

“Yes,” he says slowly, as if committing the information to memory.

 

He doesn’t open the car door for her.  It’s his brother Iosif’s car, which he’s paying through the nose in favours to borrow for the night, and she can get in herself.  He takes her to a restaurant that is halfway to being a bar, and she doesn’t let him pour her wine and he lets her pay and the waitress looks at the two of them like they’re insane because this isn’t how it’s done, but neither of them care. He keeps his hands to himself.

She doesn’t let him walk her home, either.  This one grates on him, because he worries; Moscow isn’t safe at night even if she’s exactly as good as she acts.  She takes his number when he protests, says, “If you’re going to pretend to be my mother, I’ll text you when I’m home like a good girl.”

She flutters her eyelashes when she says this, deadly sarcastic, then walks away.

He gets the text an hour and a half later:

 _If you waited up for me, go to sleep_.

He smiles at his phone in the dark and obeys.

 

“Why did you stop coming to the bus stop?”

“There was a boy there who wouldn’t stop watching me,” Aleksandra lies to him, because two dates does not mean he gets to be personal.

Aleksis doesn’t reply to that as they walk down the dark street.  Oftentimes he doesn’t reply to things, preferring to keep his own counsel. She likes it, mostly; most men don’t know when to be quiet.

“Why don’t you wear your shoes anymore?”

“The heel broke. And the instructors didn’t like it when I wore them while firing the guns.”

He hums instead of responding.

Yes, she likes silence in a man.

 

Before Christmas he asks her where she’ll be.  She says, “At home with my cat,” who doesn’t exist and he knows it.  He also knows that she says it does because one day it will. She just doesn’t have the right home for it yet.  She thinks towards the future.

“Shura,” he says, and she accepts the diminutive, although he half expects her to reject it. “Come home with me and meet my family.”

He takes her to the apartment near the bus stop, crammed full with his family members, and introduces her to all of them.  She can tell Jekatrina and Mariya apart without any trouble, a feat even he sometimes has trouble performing, and although she doesn’t touch a drop of alcohol, she lets him put an arm around her waist and pull her to his side. “You can kiss me at the new New Years’ if you can find me,” she tells him as she parts ways with him at her front door after the party is over.

She’s sitting at the bus stop on the evening of December 31st , in her uniform, a heavy coat and her boots.

He spends his kiss on her cheek to show her he knows restraint, but it makes her laugh at him, if briefly, and pull him down for a proper kiss, so it’s no waste.

 

On her birthday, which she doesn’t remember telling him, Aleksis comes by her division and hands her a box with a pair of red stilettos in it that would probably make her father roll in his grave.  “They match your lips,” he explains.

She loves them. And for a moment she’s tempted to push him against the wall and turn his lips the same colour as hers, but she’s standing in an open space full of other people, so she doesn’t.

Just says, “Thank you,” and, curious, checks the size.  “How did you know my size?”

He just shrugs, taps his temple, like it’s nothing.

 

“For the next date,” she tells him one afternoon while they’re eating lunch together, “take me somewhere I can wear your present.”

He doesn’t understand, at first.  She could wear heels anywhere except perhaps to work.  But he thinks about it for a moment and then takes her meaning. She wants to dress up. “Friday at 1900,” he tells her, because it’s always 1900 with them.  “I’ll pick you up.”

She wears the heels with a black and white dress that strikes him more speechless than usual for a few moments, her hair curling at the edges.

Her grin when she sees his dropped jaw is full of sharp edges.

She pulls him onto the dance floor at the club he brings her to and they move so well together that he keeps her there for four hours, and when he drives her home she pulls him through the door to see if they’re as good together at dancing horizontally as vertically.

 

They don’t kiss in public, by silent agreement.  This isn’t because they’re trying to hide or because they’re embarrassed, but because they both know a kiss is a vulnerable thing to show in public if one does it right. But when she gets off her patrol and swings by the office to see him before she goes home, she announces her presence by sitting on his knee, legs crossed. Aleksandra’s not a delicate woman, but she can look like one when she tries, and it helps that he practically dwarfs her.  “Sasha,” he says after a minute, deep-voiced, and that says all he needs to.  Her grin opens across her face, and she runs her thumb across the line of his shoulder, then claps him on the cheek, palm rasping across his stubble, and gets up, sashays out.

His eyes follow her until she disappears around the corner, and she knows he’ll stay quiet under the murmur of voices striking up in the room that want to know about the two of them.

The two of them are not for anybody else.

 

She has her head on his lap and he has a hand in her hair, which is longer now, brushing her chin. Her eyes are open. He loves them. She knows this even though he’s never said it.  “Stay the night,” she tells him, letting her lashes drop against her cheeks, long and dark with mascara.

This isn’t new, he stays the night a few days a week.  He brushes two fingers through her hair, twisting a lock between them; this is his answer.

“Stay tomorrow, too,” she continues, after a few more minutes.

He begins braiding the front of the long side of her hair, careful—his fingers look too large for such delicate work, but he has practice.

“If you’re good,” she says, “stay the night after as well.”

Aleksis lets his mouth curve upwards, glancing down at her.  Her eyes are still closed.  “You’re asking me to move in.”

“We always move too slow,” she replies.  “Many men ask on the third date.”

He says this only because he knows she loves it when he gets cheeky and gives her the chance to tear his words apart: “Were you waiting?”

“I don’t wait on men.”

“But you’re waiting on my answer now.”

“I already know your decision; there was no waiting.”  Aleksandra’s smile is so sharp he has to trace it with one finger to be sure it’s real.

 

She wears the red heels while he presses her into the mattress and kisses her, running his hands up her sides until he reaches her breasts, because when she wraps a leg around him and presses the point into the small of his back he follows her direction.

The third time she does it, though, he draws back and kisses his way down her leg until his lips meet the strap of the left one and slips it off her foot gently, throwing it over his shoulder before he switches to the other foot.

“No teeth here, Aleksandrina,” he murmurs into her hip, hands sliding back down to rest in the curves of her waist.  “Don’t bite me into line.”

“If I were biting, _moya solnishka_ , you would be screaming.”

“I’ll make you scream,” he warns.

She grins at him and pushes her fingers into his hair, pushing his head down and to the side. “Remember that you promised me that when your jaw is aching.”

 

Aleksandra’s unit goes into a firefight in a street riot and he’s not on duty, sees it on the news while he’s sitting at his brother’s place and shoots up off the couch, grabbing his coat and heading out the door.   “Where are you going?”  Kliment calls after him.

He doesn’t respond. His badge is at home, he has no right to be there, but he runs to the right street, pushing through the crowd. He can see over their heads, can see the line of the police, the protestors, clashing—“Lidiya! Lidiya!” someone is screaming, and as he finds her in the line, he sees her eyes go wide as a little girl is caught between the lines, crushed against the fiber police shields and between the makeshift ones of the protestors, crying out.

She breaks formation. He’s never seen her break formation before, but her shield lifts and she draws the little girl under it, holding her against her chest with one arm as she falls back into position.

When it’s all over, her arm is trembling from exertion, but she waits with the girl in the dark until her parents come to find her, crying and pleading with her not to arrest them for their involvement.  She acquiesces, for Lidiya, who is tearful and runs to her mother and father as soon as they find her.

He waits until they’re gone, on the steps with her, pulls her into his side.

“They need to keep their little girls out of their fights,” she growls, teeth out, jaw hard, and he bends to kiss her temple, hair sweaty from her helmet.

“Another woman would have let her be killed.”

“Then another woman would not deserve the air she breathes.”

 

Aleksis doesn’t start things. He always waits for her, like he knows, although she’s never told him, that she doesn’t like to be surprised. He never rushes. Although in Russia the man is supposed to be the one to propose a date, to propose moving in, to propose, he doesn’t seem threatened by letting her do it instead.  Just waits.  Patient. Quiet.

She does things she isn’t supposed to because she isn’t supposed to do them.  He lets her have those too.  Lets her put on her teeth and never shies away from them when they’re near his neck, because he knows she won’t press down.  “What better way?” he asks when she wonders aloud why he lets her posture when he knows she isn’t so aggressive as she pretends to be. “I like you vicious.”

Tyr put his hand in the jaws of a wolf and trusted it not to bite down without good reason. Aleksis does the same for her. So she files her teeth down for him before she puts them around his wrist.

Trusts him not to give her a reason to wish she hadn’t.

 

The first morning he wakes up before she does it’s because the sun is coming through the window, which he has forgotten to close, and it hits his eyes, painfully. Her face, buried in his neck, is in shade.  For a moment, he hardly believes that she’s still asleep—often by the time he wakes she’s already out of bed and dressed, military about rising on time every day for some reason—but today her hair is spread over his shoulder, white in the sunlight, and her body is loose against his, back rising and falling slowly, steadily.

He can’t see her face, but he doesn’t need to.  Knows she’s beautiful.

 

She visits her parents’ graves once a year on her mother’s birthday to put flowers on them. She doesn’t remember her mother and she doesn’t miss her father and she doesn’t cry, but here it is: her life came from their lives and that deserves some thanks, for the good she does and the good she is going to do and any good she has ever felt.

 _Life is shit_ , her father told her once, _life is shit and you look like a slut in those shoes, and someone will take advantage of you because life is shit_.

She drapes a wilting lily over his tombstone and dares life to try and take advantage of her.

 

On his twenty-second birthday she tells him she’s changed her name on the forms in the office to _Kaidonovskya_ and he thinks of the little girl at the bus stop with wind in her hair and the prickly teenager at the station with something to prove and the woman who sits on his lap when there’s a whole couch available.

Then he tells her _thank you for the present_ , because he loves all of those Aleksandras.

“I don’t have a ring,” he says to her, because even though she started this he feels that this is his job.

“I don’t want a ring,” she replies.  “You might as well collar me.”

“Collar each other,” he corrects.

She laughs.

 

“Which one of you is Aleksis Kaidonovsky?” says the man in the suit, and Aleksandra raises her eyebrows, standing up.  He takes it to mean that she’s Aleksis, even though she’s only trying to let him up from the bench, and holds out his hand to her, introducing himself.

“And this is Aleksis,” she replies, introducing him in turn.  Glancing back at him and flashing him a grin.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“The mistake was an honour. If only I were so tall.”

She’s taller than the man in the suit by three inches, and she’s wearing only her boots. This is probably why he’s so uncomfortable when he responds, “Ah.  Yes.”

Aleksis steps forward to rescue him from her smile.

 

The _militsya_ becomes the _politsiya_ and they both get promoted.  It’s not the first time they have been, not even the first time they have been almost simultaneously, but now he has a gold band crossing his shoulder and she has one running down hers.

She’s a rank ahead of him, mostly because she keeps ending up on the front lines of riots and he always seems to miss them, so she gets the honours.

She puts her uniform on in front of the mirror and he bends to kiss the gold on her shoulder and then her cheek before he drops her cap onto her head and moves her to the side by her waist so he can get his own uniform out.  “Does this make you my commanding officer?” he asks, even though they both know the answer to that.

“Even if I weren’t I’d still be your wife,” she answers, although they aren’t married, technically.

“The rank above all others.”

“I like a man who knows where he stands.”

She’s applying eyeliner, so he doesn’t touch her, but he does laugh, low and quiet.

 

There’s a riot in the Butyrka and ten guards are killed, along with almost thirty prisoners, and Aleksis is assigned to replace one of the guards, so Aleksandra marches into the office and fills out the forms for an assignment request, seldom-granted, and gets it, purely because nobody wants to work the Butyrka and because when she walks like she means business, even the ranks above her bare their necks.

Here is what the police teach her: there’s power in looking intimidating.  There’s power in knowing what it is you want, even when no one wants to give it to you.  And power isn’t the most important thing to her by a long shot, but she’s used to people resisting her authority because she’s a woman and she solves that problem by being a force of nature.

She’s almost twenty-one when they step through the doors of the overcrowded hellhouse that is the prison.

 

They have good-cop bad-cop down to a T, even though neither of them is any more bad or good than the other. Aleksis plays kind and silent and accommodating, and Aleksandra plays sharp and commanding and unbending; the characters they often play for everyone but each other.  It happens without them even talking about it.

The Butyrka is famous for disease and abuse and overcrowding.

They don’t make a dent in the disease or the overcrowding, but neither of them lays a hand on a prisoner unless they have to.

They do their jobs. This is all.

Then they go home.

 

She buys a cat. A black and white one, with one green eye and one blue eye, and brings it home. 

She’s always wanted a cat, but has never been in a position to get one.

Aleksis scares the shit out of it when she first brings it in, because he’s so huge, but within a few days it’s learned to curl up in the crook of his neck to sleep, because it’s warm there.

She takes a picture on her phone and sets it as her background, then sits on his lap and leans against his other shoulder, lets him kiss her hair until the cat wakes up and objects to losing their attention.

 

He brings her to Christmas again and his family crawls all over her again, and she sits there in her heels and her bright makeup and lets them, laughs at them, offers to show his sisters how to do the braid she has snaking across the side of her head, which Aleksis helped her with this morning, baits his brothers and compliments his mother on her cooking.

He’s never seen her be so warm with people who weren’t him.  It’s as if she’s opened, like a flower.

His father catches him staring at her in the kitchen with three of his siblings and his mother and says, “When are you going to ask her to marry you, Aleksis?”

“She already took my name,” he replies, shrugging.  That’s enough for him.

His father looks confused, but he doesn’t explain any further, just walks into the kitchen to join them.

 

On New Years, the one he doesn’t spend with his family, she tells him, “When we have the money for it, I want a baby.”

He doesn’t even look surprised, just turns his head from where it’s lying in her lap and kisses her stomach as if there’s already something there.

 

The cat, whose name he never uses because he just thinks of it as _Cat_ , sits on Aleksis’ chest and flicks its tail back and forth, one little paw batting at his beard, which has grown out over the weekend of Christmas holidays.

He gets a hand on its tail and it jumps and skitters down his chest to hide behind his feet, then oozes off the side of the couch and runs off to go find Aleksandra, who he can hear cooing over it at the end of the hall.

 

She watches him walk down the hall at the Butyrka, boots silent on the ground as he makes the rounds through the rows of cells, and smiles at him.  When one of the prisoners jeers at the look on her face, she turns on him and transforms all the fondness in the smile into a vicious baring of teeth, a dare to taunt her again.

There are some things she simply won’t let people deride.

Her emotions are among those things.

 

There are some prisoners Aleksis tries to make sure his wife doesn’t have to handle—the rapists, the paedophiles.  For their sake more than hers, although he doesn’t ever voice his intent because he knows she wouldn’t appreciate him trying to coddle her.

She never does anything unprofessional.  But the way her lip curls and her teeth slot together so hard he can almost feel them in _his_ jaw tells him she wants to, and badly, so he removes the temptation.

 

She’s barely twenty-two when Trespasser hits.  Russia isn’t, as it usually isn’t, on particularly good terms with the Americans, so there’s no panic in the streets, just a sort of awe for the disaster, an interesting talking point with former coworkers when they turn in their reports at the station.  It’s just a freak accident, a funny joke on Hollywood’s hard-on for big monster movies. Thousands of lives lost, but not their lives.  Lives are lost in the world all the time.  Russia is unperturbed.

Aleksis watches the footage over and over again, though, like he’s tracking the thing with his eyes until they nuke it.  “Ignore it, _krasavets_ ,” Aleksandra tells him, wrapping her arms around his neck from behind.  “It’s over.”

She can tell he doesn’t think it’s over.

But he turns off his phone and twists to pull her into his lap.

 

Aleksis still sometimes can’t believe that the girl from the bus stop when he was fifteen is pulling him onto the dance floor of some club in the backstreets of Moscow, is pressing against him, drawing his hands to her waist, falling into tandem with his steps easier than anything.

He runs a hand idly through the ends of her hair, which almost looks white in the dim, and picks her up to spin her and set her down gentle on her feet.

She laughs, and in the lights of the bar her teeth glow blue.

 

“Are you Aleksis Kaidonovsky?”

She’s not. But it doesn’t really matter at this point, so she nods and accepts the paperwork.

 

Reports of Hundun pour in while they’re at work, and Aleksis, standing in front of a heavy cell with four men in it, thinks abruptly of the prisons of Manila, of the people inside, trapped like rats.

Aleksandra appears around the corner like his thoughts have summoned her, face serious. She doesn’t have to say anything, he knows what her expression is asking, and he gives a single duck of his chin to say, _I’m all right_.

He’s all right, but somewhere, terrified children are running through the streets, screaming.

 

Night shift in the prison is eerie and unpleasant, the place echoing with water droplets and whispers, faint animal noises from the walls and the occasional voices of the rowdier inmates.  Aleksandra keeps her footsteps catlike, silent as she does her rounds, counting dark shapes in cells under the soft buzz of the emergency lighting that hardly illuminates the ground enough to see her feet in front of her.

One of the men in the cells for the new ones, which is more overcrowded than others, is crying, quietly, against the bars of his enclosure, hiding his weakness from his cellmates, a wise decision.  As she passes he chokes down a sob, hiding his face from her, too.

Night shift in the prison is full of human misery, and she wants nothing more than to find Aleksis and ask him to help her forget it.

She wonders when she became so comfortable relying on a man for something.

 

The PPDC coalesces out of twenty-one countries and Russia is one of them.

Aleksandra leaves a red lipstick print on the side of his neck before work that feels like _mine_ when he runs his fingers over it and he doesn’t volunteer.

“Shura,” he says quietly in the middle of the night, and she turns over into his arms.

“Yes?”

“Nothing. Go to sleep.”

“Don’t give me orders,” she tells him, but then she obeys.

 

Russia doesn’t wait for volunteers when the PPDC starts asking for them.  It just assembles its best and brightest from its police and military and ships them off to Alaska.

They pick Aleksis, but not her, and she’s not even a little surprised, even though she’s had her rank longer than him by half a year, because this is the way it always is: he’s a man. She’s a woman. She isn’t the first pick when they think of strength.  _None_ of the people Russia sends to Alaska are women.  But she will not be stuck in the Butyrka while he is in America, she refuses, so she throws her hat into the ring as a volunteer, furious that she wasn’t a first choice.

They turn her down cold, so she turns in her forms to quit instead and buys a plane ticket to Kodiak Island regardless of whether they want to send her there.

(She leaves her cat with Aleksis’ sisters, who kiss her on the cheek when she brings it over.)

She walks into the Academy with him and volunteers straight at the source, and they aren’t as choosy as her home country, which has its pride to think of.

As she’s filling out the forms, they call Aleksis back for a medical examination, but look between them, confused.  “Which one of you is Aleksis Kaidonovsky?”

Aleksis gets up, but she lets her lips twitch in amusement.  Then she puts on the form _Sasha Kaidonovskya_ , two names that aren’t legally hers—his favourite nickname and his last name. _Sasha_ can be a man or a woman.  When they call her back several hours later, the nurse, who has just changed shift, says, apologetic, “Which one of you is Sasha?”

She can feel the razor edges of her grin cutting into her face, and he snorts with amusement as she stands up and follows the nurse into the office, understanding the joke easily.

 

The scale in the makeshift doctor’s office won’t register his weight, he tips the scale. The height chart on the wall doesn’t go high enough.

“Seven feet,” he says, making the conversion to _American_. “Two hundred and forty pounds.”

The doctor whistles.

 

The compound is full of Russians, because Russia doesn’t do anything halfway, and it’s overcrowded, so it’s a relief when planes start leaving with the medically unfit.

“It’s like the fucking Butyrka,” Sasha comments to him as they’re undressing for bed.  “Crammed in like sardines.”

“No bars,” he points out.

“Will you two shut up?” comes the accented voice of one of their roommates in English, irritated. “Some of us are trying to sleep.”

“I’m so sorry, baby boy,” she says in Russian, knowing he won’t understand it, and rolls her eyes.

“We could fuck in the bunk to piss him off,” Aleksis suggests, very quietly, so it doesn’t matter that he says it in Russian, the man couldn’t hear it if he tried.

She snorts and twists around to pat him on the cheek.

 

“Where are the women?” she asks one morning two weeks into their stay in Alaska.  Aleksis glances around, although he doesn’t have to. He noticed it the moment he walked in, although no one else seems to have.  Then he looks down at his wife, ignoring the man on the bench next to him, who looks uncomfortable with the topic.

“A hundred men in this hall and seven women that I have counted,” she continues, because he doesn’t need to say anything to have a conversation with her.  “Why is that?”  Like she doesn’t know.

“Probably can’t pass the physical requirements,” says the man sitting next to her.

Aleksis taps her knee with his under the table to keep her grounded.

Her voice is hard as a diamond anyway.  “Prove this to me and maybe I won’t clean your greasy face with the mats in the gym.”

 _Wolf_ , he thinks, amused, and nudges his ankle against hers.

 

The facility on Kodiak Island is barely a lab, otherwise a shoddily thrown-together set of barracks and a few large rooms that they’re using for one thing or the other.

It’s cold.

Cold doesn’t bother them.

Not because being Russian gives them immunity, because they were smart enough to bring coats.

The Australians, and the South Americans, and the Californians, who were not smart enough, they’re shivering. “Fucking cold as a witch’s tit,” one of the Australians says to her as they’re all standing in line for yet another bureaucratic invention, the psychological exam.  He’s tall and has sandy red hair and a stupid little mustache.  She doesn’t remember his name.

“You wouldn’t last one day in Moscow,” she informs him, because he wouldn’t.

“Wouldn’t fuckin’ want to, now would I, sweetheart?”

“I’m not your sweetheart,” she tells him casually as they step closer to the door, ”Call me this again and I will make you wish you were still making nice with the little kangaroos.”

“Too late,” he grumbles.

 

Later Academy classes will have classes. Will have teachers. Will have programs and grades and military control.

The class of 2015 has none of that.

The class of 2015 starts with ninety-seven pilots who get through the physical and mental exams and the background checks.

Here’s how it works: you sink, or you swim.  You train, you obey, you make the cut.

Or you don’t make the cut.

Most don’t make the cut.

There are seven Jaegers on their way to being built, for launch at the end of 2015. One of them is Russia’s, and she wants it manned by Russians at the base that’s being built in Vladivostok.

So it’s a shame that out of the nineteen Russians who made it into the ninety-seven, only fourteen lasted two weeks.  Only six lasted a month.

Only two left now.

 

Hercules and Scott Hansen have a little boy in tow, a skinny eleven-year-old who looks a little scared of everything and snaps to attention like he’s in the military too when any of the volunteers walks by, tagging around after his father and uncle like a lost puppy.

He’s Sasha’s favourite Hansen, because Scott Hansen is an arrogant prick and Hercules Hansen always looks like he needs a drink.

And because she likes children.

Sometimes when she sees him in the mess hall, she ruffles his hair as she passes, smiles at him, watches his little eyes go wide.

 

Twenty of them make it to drifting, as it’s called.

Caitlin Lightcap explains it to them and asks for volunteers to try it in a sim room, looking slightly apprehensive, which makes Aleksis stand back from volunteering. He’s not a coward, but he’s not stupid.

“I’ll have a go,” says Scott Hansen, stepping forward.

Hercules follows him, because he always does, rolling his shoulders like he’s about to step into the ring.

“I’ll see you fuckers in hell,” Scott says as the two of them step through the door.

Aleksis has to try hard not to smile at that.

 

The Hansens drift well enough, and when they step out of the room, shaking and stumbling towards each other and then away when they bump shoulders, looking like they’ve just seen a ghost, two bouncy Californian twins step forwards and try it.

Fifteen minutes later, they’re carrying the two of them out on stretchers.  They’d come out of sync and the one left in the stream had had a stroke before they could unhook the machines.

She dies in the hospital.

Sasha is one of two women left in a class that is now eighteen strong.

 

One other pair, a pair of middle-aged Japanese men, goes down the next day. Not all pairs work out, apparently. Dr. Lightcap looks perplexed, and Aleksis worries about that look on her face, because it means she doesn’t know why some of them are washing out.

They keep putting people in anyway, because people keep volunteering, and it’s not the technology that’s throwing them out of the Drift, that’s each other.

The Gage twins pass through effortlessly, undaunted by the failure of the Japanese pair.

A day passes with no incident, two pairs skating through easily.

So they volunteer for the day after that, and the Mexican pair that goes in before them wipes out spectacularly—one of them actually dies in the chair.  His partner staggers out of the room screaming _No No No_ over and over again before they rush him to the clinic.

Four people drop out after that, one man who has a fight with his partner about it right at the door of the room and then his partner, looking apologetic and angry all at once, and a father-son pair from China who leave because the son freezes up as they’re walking to the day’s trials and can't move any direction but backwards, away.

They put their names forth again anyway.

She reaches out for his hand as they strap them into the chairs, instructing them the whole while, and drops it only when they need to strap down their arms, too.

 

In the Drift he is a little girl looking up at her father, who is drinking straight from a bottle, he is the same girl at twelve letting her father braid her hair, he is the teenager who is putting on those black heels for the first time, teetering around. He is noticing himself staring at the bus stop, years before he thought she had noticed him. He is growing breasts, he is terrified because someone has a hand on them in the darkness of the streets in Moscow, he is angry because everything is unfair and his father is still drinking.

He is Aleksandra kissing her gun, he is Aleksandra at a funeral, he is Aleksandra getting a failing grade in school, he is Aleksandra wearing red heels and kissing himself. He is her confusion over looking at him in the morning and feeling warm instead of ashamed.

He is Sasha signing her forms, Sasha snapping her teeth at Scott Hansen, Sasha fiercely unwilling to let him go into this without her.

He comes into the silence as he feels the echoes of her living his life, and she’s there a moment later, they both are.

He’s confused as to which of them he is for a brief moment when they disconnect from it.

“How was it, Kaidonovsky?” Scott Hansen says when they walk back out, dazed.  He doesn’t bother talking to Sasha anymore, just addresses them by their last name collectively, because she’s made it very clear she doesn’t like him.  It’s one of the few things he does that doesn’t bother her. She likes it when men know how to shut up.

“Successful,” she says, he says. One of them does. He thinks it’s her. He might be her. He’s not sure, but it doesn’t matter.

 

The bunk is so narrow it barely fits Aleksis’ shoulders, so Sasha sleeps draped over his chest, because being more than a few feet from each other makes them both twitchy so soon after the Drift—she knows, she can _feel_ it.

They didn’t tell her she would be able to feel it afterwards.

But there he is, in the back of her head.

She thinks, to herself, knowing he can hear it, that this is where he’s supposed to be.

 

The last pair to drift is Tamsin Sevier and Stacker Pentecost, and when they emerge from the room, steadier on their feet than everyone who came before, there are seven pairs who have successfully come through the testing.

 _Perfect_ , Aleksis thinks, _a set for every Jaeger_ , because at this point, they’ll put anyone who can hack it into one, and then lets the Hansens drag him out with the rest of them—they take the hop to Anchorage, two hours, and go to a nightclub, all fourteen of them, even though Tamsin and Stacker are still gravitating towards one another, looking alarmed at each other every few seconds as whatever ghostly threads still connecting them pass information back and forth.

Four of the new pilots get tattoos at four in the morning, drunk off their asses—the rest of them swear never to mention it again.  Tamsin gets an eyebrow piercing, and they laugh at the way Stacker winces when the needle pieces her.

Sasha wears her red heels for the first time since Russia, and when Scott, who has had three too many Jaegerbombs ( _It’s appropriate for the occasion, Herc, don’t give me that eye_ ) for his own good, makes a comment about how her ass looks in them, she smiles sweetly at him, presses close, and grinds the point into his foot.

He falls over the barstool, yelping, and Hercules goes after him, looking worried, but he’s fine, just covered in alcohol and bruised.

Aleksis has learned, over the years, that he doesn’t need to defend her.

She does that perfectly well by herself.

 

Tacit Ronin’s crew ships out with Horizon Brave’s two days after they all finish testing, because those are the first two Jaegers done.  The Gages take the train to LA the same night to wait for Romeo Blue.

Before they leave, Scott Hansen digs into his pocket and whips out a hand full of gold and passes all six of them heavy metal rings with little wings on them and the number ‘ _15_ in the middle, says, “Class rings,” then keeps passing them out while everyone tries to figure out how the younger Hansen turned out to be the sentimental one.

Sasha takes hers without complaint, even if she doesn’t like him.

On the inside of the band it says _SEE YOU IN HELL_ , because Scott Hansen is an arrogant prick.

Still, it’s a little amusing.

 

“I’m going to buy us wedding rings,” Sasha tells him that night as they’re stripping down for bed.

Aleksis raises his eyebrow. “They aren’t collars anymore?”

“I’m not wearing baby Hansen’s ring before I wear yours.”

 

Tasmania Victor’s pilots, a couple of cousins from Malaysia, ship out a month later, and then it’s just the Hansens and the Kaidonovskys and Coyote Tango’s pilots waiting around on their rides out.  Tamsin and Sasha get along like a house on fire, except on the mats, where they don’t mesh even a little bit.

It’s always a tossup which one of them will win—Sasha’s got her in weight and strength and height, but Tamsin has some legitimate military training and experience before the Academy, whereas Sasha’s training was always limited to what the _politsiya_ thought they were going to need.

Watching them on the mats always makes Aleksis want to smile, as he wants to smile when Sasha slams Scott Hansen over her shoulder and into the ground, using her own experience with opponents larger than her to bring him down so effectively Tamsin crows at the takedown.

No one but his wife will spar with him.  Even Hercules and Stacker, who have beaten everyone else in the room, both just shake their heads looking at him.

The two of them on the mats look ridiculous, him over a foot taller than her and so much broader it’s almost comical, but she weaves around him easily—it feels more like the dim floor of a club than the brightly-lit gym they’re in.

Stacker’s watching them closely as they dance, and when they’re done, he says, contemplative, “Hercules. You and Scott, how do you—?”

 

When the six of them and Dr. Lightcap aren’t testing Stacker’s budding theory of fighting styles, they have to amuse themselves in other ways.  Tamsin produces a pack of cards, and they try playing poker, but they all know their partners too well to be able to bluff properly, so they start playing in teams instead.

Sasha sits in Aleksis’ lap as Scott deals, and there’s something subtly off about his rhythm, but she doesn’t realize what it is until he and Hercules start wiping the floor with the rest of them.

They’re cheating.

Tamsin realizes about the same time she does, she can tell, because her eyes narrow in the direction of the two Australians, and from there, the tides start turning, because she and Stacker are cheating too, mercilessly and shamelessly.

The only people losing now are them, because they don’t know poker well enough to manipulate it the way the rest of them do.

So halfway through the third round of losing heavily, Sasha throws her cards down in the middle of the table. “You are all filthy cheaters,” she tells them, and Tamsin and Scott have the grace to laugh. “Let us show you a Russian card game that you do not know how to cheat at yet.”

Aleksis looks at her, and she gathers the cards and starts dealing.

She makes up the game as she goes along and he takes her lead easily, making up rules right along with her.

They win this set.

And the next.

 

They go out dancing again and Stacker watches Aleksis and Sasha with fascination. “He’s thinking about his theories again,” Sasha tells Tamsin, and the woman snorts, blowing brightly-coloured hair out of her face.  “You should distract him.”

“Me’n’Stacks, we’re not like that.”

“No?”

“Why, is the Drift good for it?” Sasha just smiles, and Tamsin raises her eyebrows.  “Huh.  Unfortunately, we don’t swing each other’s ways.”

“Then you should come home with us.”  She elbows Aleksis, although they’ve talked about this a long time since, not with Tamsin, but with a woman.

Tamsin laughs. “As long as you’re in the middle.”

 

They’re sitting in the mess with Stacker and Tamsin, because neither of the Hansens are morning people or cold people, both of which it is, and Tamsin says, “So, I’ve been wondering, because you’re kind of young, when did you two get married?”

They both blink and look at each other, and Sasha answers after a minute.  “Never legally.”

Tamsin’s mouth drops open. “Fuck me, you’re joking.”

“No,” Aleksis says, shrugging.

“Then is your name not Kaidonovsky?” Stacker asks delicately, like he’s trying to be subtle about making sure their paperwork is correct.  He’s no stickler for the rules, but he has something more of military organization about him than any of the rest of them do.

“My name isn’t Sasha, either,” she replies, voice tart.

Tamsin throws a piece of biscuit at her. “No shit!  What is it?”

“This is for me and him to know,” Sasha replies with her mouth twitching—not that it’s a secret, not really, and not from these two for long, but it’s a matter of principle.

 

Catching the plane back to Russia feels odd, but the moment they put their feet on the grounds of the Vladivostok Shatterdome everything makes sense.

Cherno Alpha is a massive iron beast of a thing, heavy and tall, and in her blueprints she’s missing one important thing that Aleksis has never seen the blueprints of a Jaeger without: escape pods.  He points out the lack to Sasha, and her grin turns a little sharper.

“We kill the fuckers or they kill us,” she says.

His wife is vicious.

He’s never loved a human being more.

 

The second time they ever drift, it’s in their Jaeger—under supervision, of course. The drivesuits are rough, metal plates thrown together and strapped onto them more than anything—intended to protect from burns, mostly.  Cherno’s conn-pod is heavily fortified and the core is far separated from it, both for radiation protection and to create two confusing targets for the kaiju.

They hand Sasha the helmet for the left pilot, stamped with 02, which makes Aleksis raise his eyebrows, but they’re fitted for their own heads, so they don’t switch.

Instead, inside the conn-pod, they trade off shoulder gear and plug into the sides of the cockpit they both know they should be on.  It means that the gear of each helmet points the wrong way, hanging over Sasha’s left eye and Aleksis’ right, but that doesn’t matter, and neither do the numbers on the backs of the helmets.

“Initiating neural handshake.”

“Cherno Alpha, ready for neural handshake,” Sasha replies.

The countdown starts, then finishes, and then they’re together.

 

Russia quickly lays down protocol on how the Shatterdome is to be run, and one of the things that it does is order a system of a patrols, which is a shame, since there’s only one Jaeger housed in Vladivostok at the moment and they can’t be in Cherno 24 hours a day.

So they put in a call to Tokyo.

Coyote Tango, Tacit Ronin, and Cherno Alpha take two four-hour shifts a day each, covering the coast from St. Lawrence Island to Yakushima, and if the Russian government doesn’t like it, they can lift their regulations, because the coast of Russia and Japan is the best-protected section of the Pacific Rim.

It makes their teams good.

It makes them very good.

 

Sasha wakes up thinking she’s Aleksis for a moment, then realizes her head is on his chest, kisses his shoulder and gets up, pulling on her heavy boots and pants, a black shirt and a green coat.

As she’s starting to put her hair up—it gets in the way of the relay when she leaves it down—he slips into the bathroom behind her, edging her hands out of her hair and finishing the braids himself, curving them around her head with gentle fingers. “Thank you,” she says, enjoying the feel of his hands, and he doesn’t reply, just puts the last pin in to curl her braids into a bun at the back of her neck and then kisses the nape of it.

That night, he disappears after their shift, and returns with all the equipment to bleach his hair.

She sits on the bathroom counter and shaves his beard off carefully with a straight razor, then helps him turn his hair the same white-blonde colour hers is.  “Smooth as a baby’s bottom,” she pronounces after they’re done, stroking the fingers of her left hand down his jaw, and he laughs.

“It’ll grow back in.”

Then he starts helping her take out her braids.

 

Cherno Alpha and Tacit Ronin encounter their first kaiju together—Cherno’s on patrol when the thing hits, running down the coast to Osaka, sounding the alarm as Tacit Ronin launches from the Tokyo Shatterdome.  The fight is unpracticed, and both of them take damage—Coyote Tango launches two hours into it to help, because none of them have ever taken on a kaiju before, they’re not good at that, yet.

The kill officially feeds to Tacit Ronin’s kill count, but Cherno is holding the beast in a loose approximation of a full-nelson when Ronin’s blades carve through its throat and belly.

It’s slow and messy, takes four hours.  But they stumble out of the conn-pod victorious, and Aleksis rips her helmet off in the ready room, shoves her into the wall and kisses her hard, riding the adrenaline high.

When they look up, the techs are gaping.  “What?”

“We—thought you were brother and sister.”

Sasha holds up her hand and slaps the back of it, drawing attention to the ring, sitting on the finger next to her Academy ring.  “Married.”

Aleksis laughs and kisses her again, then starts pulling off her armour.

The techs prudently vacate the room.

 

Eden Assassin is built the next year, its pilots a mother-daughter pair from the Ukraine, and it cuts everybody’s patrols down to two three-hour shifts a day. The two of them greet them when they fly in, and Sasha grins.  “I see mother Russia got over her qualms about women in Jaegers.”

The mother, Marya Ejzenberg, a former martial arts champion with long dark hair and bright green eyes, smiles back and says, “No.  She calls it the _cock_ pit for a reason. We volunteered on our own.”

The joke only works in English, but the three of them roar with laughter anyway while the daughter blushes.

 

Tamsin collapses in the cockpit in Tokyo and Stacker finishes the battle alone, impossibly. Cherno’s housed in the half-destroyed Tokyo Shatterdome for a few months because the southern half of Asia is always more heavily hit by the kaiju while the two of them are run through medical and then decommissioned.

The official word on Tamsin’s condition is this: seizure in the cockpit, previously undiagnosed condition.  The unofficial word is how all of the Mark I.s suddenly have extra radiation shielding installed.

Nobody really notices the little girl clinging to Stacker Pentecost’s legs in the flurry of activity that goes on following Onibaba until her story comes out.

 

The two of them take a detour to visit Tamsin in Hawaii on their way to help Stacker out at the Academy, where he’s taken over, and she’s thin and pale against the sheets, but she’s still herself.

Her Academy ring sits on her middle finger, the way it sits on all of theirs— _fuck Scott Hansen, am I right?_ was how the Gage twins had put it—and she laughs even though it looks like it hurts to laugh.

“They’re going to say I had this before,” she tells them as they’re leaving.  “And I don’t care, but it’s not true, so watch yourselves, yeah?”

 

Stacker Pentecost’s theory of _Drift Compatibility_ is going to go down in history, some day, but it’s something they had sort of known even before he put it to words, the reason some pairs simply didn’t make it through drifting.  The reason it’s important that he puts it to words is that there’s a way to _test_ it.

He demonstrates for the Academy students, the fourth class of them—later, the Academy will put out two full classes of Ranger hopefuls a year, but for now, they’re still figuring out what needs to be taught—drags the two of them onto the mat. “Sasha and Aleksis Kaidonovsky are _Drift compatible_ ,” he says to the class, who look somewhat apprehensive about watching a man who stands seven feet tall fight a woman who _isn’t_. “You can see it when they spar.”

Both of them look at the staffs in their hands.  They could probably make it work, but it’s not either of their styles, so they toss them aside in unison and put on a show with their hands instead.

If he were trying, he thinks he could bring her down, because he simply has the size advantage and the strength advantage and the weight advantage, but this isn’t a fight. It’s not about hitting his wife. It’s not about _bringing her down_.  It’s about the _dance_.

 

Mako Mori doesn’t speak a word of Russian and Sasha doesn’t speak a word of Japanese—well, she does, but it’s not a word she would say around children—so they don’t really communicate much, and the first time the girl sees the two of them, massive and severe-looking, she skitters out of the room as if the floor is on fire, necessitating Stacker chasing her down to make sure she doesn’t get hurt because she doesn’t know the place yet.

“Don’t raise her in the cockpit,” Sasha tells him when he visits them in their quarters later, voice rough. “Hercules Hansen is doing this with his boy and you see how well it’s working for him.”

“I don’t know how to raise a child,” Stacker admits, scrubbing a hand across his face. “Tamsin’s better with her than I am.”

He’s usually too stoic to admit uncertainty like this.

“She’s a scared little girl,” Sasha says.  “Don’t say this to her, or you’ll make her more scared.  Pretend you know what you are doing until you do know what you’re doing. And never let her think she’s less important than if she had a dick.  It’s what the media in her country is trying to teach her by making you her knight in shining armour.”

He laughs, humourlessly, more of a harsh breath than a real sound of mirth.  “Yes, Tamsin told me that too.  I hadn’t noticed.”

“And if you need someone to watch her if you need to be somewhere you can’t take her, you know where to find us.”

 

Cherno’s first kill takes place in the middle of the night and they’re on patrol, nearing the end of their shift when the alert sounds in the Okhotsk Sea, a Cat. I codenamed Raythe. They don’t talk when they’re in the Drift—their handshake strength is always a hundred percent, their wave variance usually hovering at three percent.  They don’t _need_ to talk. But it’s boring, on patrol, so they’re playing mind games when the alert comes through.

 _If the bastard is a category one and we have the ability to pump 415kV into its ugly skull_ , she thinks vaguely at him, _how far do you think we will have to have it out of the water to avoid killing ourselves?_

The answer is that their Jaeger can handle the shock that reverberates through the water when they fry the thing.

 

A week after the kill—Sasha sews a cross across the back of both of their jackets—their tech crew corners them when they’re getting off first patrol since the repairs to Cherno. “This is from her fist,” the chief says, holding out two grey objects.  “For you on her first kill.”

Rings, heavy iron with Cherno’s symbol stamped into the tops of them to make the surface rough and square.

If not for their bare little fingers, they would both look like they were wearing brass knuckles.

“We’ll have to do something about this last finger,” she tells him, amused.

 

Roman Dodge, Russia’s Mark III., arrives the next year.

It malfunctions and kills both its pilots during a simple patrol.

The Vladivostok Shatterdome is draped in black for weeks.

Russia doesn’t make any more Jaegers after that.

 

“I’ve been bleeding for three weeks,” she tells him over breakfast one morning, as if he doesn’t know, as if he isn’t in her head every day.

“Ask a doctor,” he replies, like she knew he would.

He sits in the waiting room while she goes in, dwarfing his chair.

 

It’s uterine cancer.

It’s early, luckily for them, but the doctors say this kind spreads easily, so they perform a hysterectomy two weeks later, when all the tests have come in.  They don’t let him in the surgery with her, but he’s by her hospital bed from the time they let him in until the time she comes out of anesthesia.

He can feel her pain through the ghost Drift, but she doesn’t ask for painkillers. “You didn’t want to raise a baby in a cockpit even before,” he tells her, because he knows she’s thinking it. Complete removal of the uterus, the ovaries, the cervix, everything.

“A war makes orphans. After it we can adopt.”

He kisses her forehead, strokes her hair back.  “ _Da_ , we can adopt.”

 

She’s not allowed to pilot for six weeks, so Aleksis directs the addition of more radiation shielding in their cockpit while she watches.  Nadya, Assassin’s 01, hugs her when she sees her, tucking her head beneath Sasha’s chin, whispers, “I’m sorry.”

Sasha runs a hair through her bright purple hair, like she’s petting a cat, and says, “Sorry for what, _kotik_?  I had a routine procedure.”

This is the press story.

 

Mako Mori stays at the Vladivostok Shatterdome for a month in the summer while her father is making the rounds through diplomats and the UN—Aleksis hears she usually goes to Sydney, but Sydney is in turmoil with Scott Hansen’s dismissal. The week before she comes, Sasha sends out a message to everyone in the ‘dome, ordering English while she’s here, and furthermore saying that if any of the Shatterdome’s employees have children or teenagers, they can bring them to work.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”  Aleksis asks her, but he already knows what her answer will be.

“Children can’t be around adults all the time,” she says smartly, and the Vladivostok Shatterdome becomes the first of any of the eight to have a childcare facility attached. When a reporter decides to be smart about it and ask if that’s because three of the four Rangers stationed in Vladivostok are women, Sasha asks him if his microphone is any bigger than his dick.

It’s an earpiece. Aleksis manages not to laugh only very narrowly.

 

At sixteen Mako is a thin, quiet girl, and she greets them in Russian, but with a very Japanese bow. Her hair is dyed bright hot pink, just like Tamsin’s had been, and she’s shaved one side of her head—the same way Sasha did when she was sixteen.  She gets on famously with Nadya and demonstrates a knack for mechanical design, which is only emphasized when Nova Hyperion lands in the bay, one of the new Mark IV.s, and Sasha can practically see her hands twitching with a desire to touch.

By the time Stacker swings back by to pick her up and she greets him with her same polite bow, she has a nipple piercing, glossy black tips on all her nails, and burns on her hands from where they’ve let her at the machinery, not that anybody but Sasha and Nadya know about that first one.

 

Crimson Typhoon’s first deployment is at Osaka with Cherno, and the Kaidonovskys take down the kaiju, but they’re very interested in the third-arm technique.

Not that either of them would ever Drift with anyone else, but it’s an intriguing concept.

 

Directly after Osaka they fly back out to the Academy to teach visiting Ranger classes in combat. It means they have to do bushido training like they’re supposed to instead of just wrestling, but they were _politsiya_. They can follow orders.

There are fifteen girls in a class of sixty-three who start, and Sasha takes one look at that and decides all fifteen are going to make it if she has anything to do with it

She buys a pair of heel-less heels—not tall ones, she’s not suicidal, no more than three inches—and teaches extracurricular combat courses in them, just to show the girls that none of them need to shave their heads and wear cargo shorts to kick a man’s ass.

 

In 2020 they cause structural damage to Seoul taking down Atticon—this doesn’t count the buildings they smash because Echo Sabre was incapacitated trying to take it down and let the kaiju past the Miracle Mile—but they use their Roll of Nickels move to break its skull open and it shakes the city to its foundations. Buildings are still collapsing from time to time months later, which they’re not proud of, but—

Well, it’s something of an achievement.

(Aleksis and Sasha Kaidonovsky are not good people.  They aren’t bad people, either, they’re just people.  And shaking South Korea so badly it maintains structural instability for months afterwards is something only a government or two can lay claim to.)

 

Sasha is more talkative than her husband everywhere but the conn-pod and for the journalists. In the conn-pod he does the talking because she always forgets she needs to, and for the journalists they share the burden equally.

“When did you two meet?”

“When I was thirteen,” she says.  “He was fifteen and liked to stare.”

Then she bares her teeth in a grin as he looks at her, eyes saying _Stop embarrassing me_.

“And when did you start dating?”

“Will that help you write about the three kaiju we’ve killed?”  Aleksis asks.

“No, but—”

“Then you don’t need to know,” Sasha finishes.

 

In the ready room, strapping on their drivesuits, they listen to music, because it helps them get into sync if their hearts are already beating together.

Ukrainian Hardhouse, because it makes them both want to dance, and because it gets stuck in their heads so firmly that it echoes through the Drift and gives them something to do as they’re walking up and down the coast.

They have almost complete radio silence between them and Vladivostok’s division of LOCCENT, every day. Since there are three Jaegers at the Shatterdome, they have two four-hour shifts of the Russian coast every day now—Japan and China handle themselves.

 

After they drift, Sasha’s blood always pounds in her veins and she knows his does, too, because she can feel it.  So here is their routine:

Drift, patrol, debrief, tear off each other’s drivesuits and shower off the relay gel together.

Some days he holds her against the wall of the shower with the water cooling over their heads and slams into her rough, with her ankles hooked around his waist.  Other days she teases him until he’s practically growling with how she won’t let him touch her properly and then shoves him onto the bed with her hair still wet and pulls out a strap-on dildo and a knife-sharp grin. Still other days one or the other of them insists on being gentle and slow.

Right after the Drift they can’t take anyone else to bed with them, because they’re still too much the same person.

And they’re always slightly post-Drift these days.

That’s all right with them.

They don’t need a third.

 

They’re on patrol, covering the north tip of Japan, when they get word of a Cat. IV heading towards Vietnam.  Crimson Typhoon should be covering it, but one of the pilots has three broken ribs and the PPDC doesn’t want them out alone, so they’re transported down the coast and Striker Eureka is transported up it to meet in a three-Jaeger strike team that arrives only a few minutes before the kaiju does.  “Weis, Kaidonovskys,” Hercules Hansen’s voice says over the radios. “We’re in past the Miracle Mile.”

Of course they are. They needed to be here before the kaiju, and that necessitated moving in past the safe point.

“Three of us,” one of the triplets says, “One of him.”

“Let’s fuck it up,” Aleksis says, punching the button for inter-Jaeger radio.

“Sounds like enough of a plan to me,” agrees Hercules, and if he’s being sarcastic, well, then he can go fuck himself.

It’s all the plan they need.

Striker has its sting blades in the kaiju’s belly when the Cherno gets around behind it and puts her fists on the side of its head.  “Get out,” Aleksis says calmly over the radio, and Striker pulls back so fast it’s almost comical as they pump the kaiju full of enough electricity to light up a city.

 

The younger Hansen has grown up to be every bit as much of a prick as his uncle, but not in the same way, which is the only reason Sasha doesn’t hate him.  He disappears halfway through the evening, Wei triplets in tow, probably because he doesn’t want to be drinking with his dad.

It’s odd to the two of them, because they don’t want to be separated after drifting. Hercules just looks grim, puts away a shot of whiskey, doesn’t say anything about it.

Sasha makes the executive decision that he isn’t going to let his boy have all the fun and yanks him onto the dance floor with them, where he promptly proves he can’t dance for shit.

 

Aleksis goes home to visit his family for the first time in five years after Ho Chi Minh, kisses his parents on their foreheads and lets his brothers push him around and tweaks his sister’s noses.

Sasha doesn’t come with him—not because she doesn’t want to, but because she’s mired in duties following the kill that they can’t _both_ leave behind—and it strikes him on the train that this is the furthest he’s ever been from her.  And certainly the furthest he’s been since 2015, after which they’ve rarely even been in different rooms.

He misses her like he feels he would miss a limb.

Keeps turning to the empty space at his right.  Keeps glancing up to get her opinion about things and then remembering she’s not there. Reaches out once blindly when someone sits on the couch next to him and puts his arm around Nicolay’s waist before his brother jumps up, batting him away.

He calls her that night, late, because he can’t sleep without her lying over his chest.

 

Eden Assassin’s 02 pilot, Marya, who is almost fifty-three, has a heart attack in the saddle on patrol in the Bering Sea, and Nadya, overloaded and unable to get away from the Drift or the Jaeger, chokes on her tongue as the full neural load causes her to go into a seizure.

By the time they manage to recover the Jaeger, both of them have been dead in their iron prison at the bottom of the sea for nearly an hour.

Cherno carries her home instead of just hooking her back up to the jumphawks, because after they scoop her up from the bottom of the sea, they don’t want to let go.

It’s another hour getting her home.

Peeling Nadya’s limp frame out of the drivesuit, brushing her sweat-stiff, purple hair out of her face, Sasha feels as if she’s lost a child.

The funeral is the next day, as per Jewish tradition, and only Aleksis’ hand on the small of her back keeps her face even.

 

An Yuna and Pang So-Yi never stop fighting.

It drives Aleksis crazy. Even after the deaths of the Ejzenbergs, when he can feel Sasha’s grief like a second heartbeat in his mind, the two of them are always bickering like little children, and finally he snaps and slams a hand down onto the table at breakfast, shaking it so hard a cup of coffee spills over the edge and shocking the two of them into terrified stillness.

Sasha’s head comes up sharply, eyes trained on his face.

“If you are not going to be nice to each other, stop speaking,” he growls, and his wife’s hand makes its way to his thigh to calm him, “If you cannot go a day without tearing at each other’s throats you don’t deserve the Drift.  We can afford better pilots than you now.”

This is a lie, but the stunned silence that follows him as he stands and walks out of the hall, Sasha following him at a distance of two paces, is enough for him.

 

Sasha sits in a meeting full of administrative heads talking on screens and is bored, listening to Stacker talk about budgets and media and the decline of the age of the Jaegers.

She and Aleksis will be here until the world ends, one way or the other.

Vladivostok doesn’t open to the media, because Russia still likes to be secretive about her technology. The two of them continue.

They always continue.

 

They’re five and three quarters hours into a patrol Drift—Vladivostok and Tokyo have started splitting shifts again, with only two Jaegers to each ‘dome—and are about to head home to dock when the alarm sounds.  A Cat. IV. off the Kamchatka Penninsula.

It passes the Miracle Mile before they get there, but Russia under their watch has never seen a kaiju hit land, and it will not see one tonight.

They engage it seven hours and sixteen minutes into the Drift.

 

At eight hours and four minutes they break the record for longest Drift, previously held by the Gage twins in Romeo Blue, which hadn’t moved fast enough, was the joke, to finish the fight in less time than that.

At eight hours and fifty-six minutes they’re slamming the Cat. IV into the water, dragging it out to sea.

 

Ten hours and forty-eight minutes into the Drift, Aleksis doesn’t know if he’s Aleksis or Sasha—the feeling is familiar, but it’s different, this time, a little.

In the Drift he forgets whose memories are whose.

“Two percent brain wave variance,” comes the grainy voice of the LOCCENT tech over the radio.  “You hold the record again.”

At ninety-seven percent synchronicity before, they’d been tied with one fluke Drift of Striker Eureka’s.

 

At eleven hours and thirteen minutes, the kaiju won’t fucking die.

Nova Hyperion comes for them, and is put out of commission at twelve hours and twenty-two minutes by several direct hits to her conn-pod from the kaiju’s front claws, which crack through it in minutes and might have killed them if Cherno hadn’t taken it from behind.  Nova is good, but her design isn’t Cherno Alpha’s. Her head is exposed, and this kaiju knows, somehow, to go for the head.

They’ve used the Tesla Fists already, and they can’t use them again, and it didn’t kill the thing, it just _absorbed_ the electricity, and it won’t fucking die.

Sasha and Aleksis, although who is who is uncertain, raise their right fist high, slam it downwards into the kaiju’s ugly face.

They aren’t talking anymore.

Don’t need to talk.

Fuck LOCCENT’s reports.

 

Sixteen hours and eight minutes into the fight and the voice over the radio from LOCCENT sounds amazed when he tells them they’re twice now over the longest Drift on record.

The kaiju still isn’t dead.  In unison, they wonder if he thinks they care.

Records and badges and skulls on the backs of their jackets don’t mean anything when there’s a monster in the water and they’re standing inside the iron wall keeping it from the people they made a promise to protect.

It’s just like prison, one of them thinks. Except now the prison is the Pacific Ocean, and the job is slaughtering the inmate.

“Ninety-nine percent synced,” comes the awed breath over the comms.

They know.

 

It’s not that they aren’t killing the kaiju. They are.  They keep pumping kill blows into it, doing things that should wreck it, and it keeps jumping back up like none of it was even real.

At almost seventeen hours it feels like a dream, all just a nightmare.

Sasha is aching.  Or maybe Aleksis is.

Cherno Alpha groans under the strain.

They scream, feral, as they’re dragged another slow mile inwards to shore.

 

At seventeen hours and thirty-four minutes, the sky is grey with news crews filming them and PPDC jets, at the ready if the kaiju fells them.  They can see the shore.  They can see the shore.

Cherno Alpha, who is neither Aleksis Kaidonovsky or Sasha Kaidonovskya, draws back her fist again and slams it into the beast over and over again, thinking,

_Die. Die.  Die.  Die._

 

At eighteen hours, two minutes, and seventeen seconds, Cherno Alpha uses Roll of Nickels again, shaking the ocean floor around them, and finally, finally, cracks through the kaiju’s head, a direct hit.  It’s been sliding out of her grip too fast for her to get a handle on it since the beginning, to land a kill blow harsh enough to crush its thick bone.

Blue spills from the skull, and Cherno throws the twitching carcass over her shoulder, hoping some of the blood hits the news crews.

She watches the water, waiting for the next attack from the thing.

The kaiju doesn’t rise.

 

At eighteen hours, five minutes, and four seconds, Cherno is hooked up to the jumphawks and the Drift disconnects.

It’s like losing the world, like everything around them shivers, unreal—instead of the battle they’re seeing the inside of the conn-pod, and the experience is jarring. They’re two bodies again, instead of one, hanging in the harnesses, unable to stand.

Aleksis can feel everything his wife is thinking, looks to his right and sees the wall. Looks to his left and sees himself.

Aleksis is confused, for a moment, and then Sasha realizes she is not Aleksis.

“Cherno Alpha! Cherno Alpha!” the voice over the radio is saying.  “Are you all right? No one’s ever had that little variance before!  The longest Drift on re—”

They both stop listening in unison.

 

They can’t walk, afterwards, muscles exhausted, collapse out of the harnesses and let the techs wrestle them onto stretchers and take them to medical.  They keep speaking in tandem—when they can move again, they can’t stop moving in sync. It’s as if they’re still Drifting.

Aleksis can’t tell himself from Sasha sometimes, looks down at his chest and is confused when there aren’t breasts there, slams into a doorframe because he expects himself to be smaller.

When he falls back, she falls back, too, even though she hadn’t hit anything.

 

Sasha sits patiently through the medical testing.

There’s nothing wrong with her.

She can still feel Aleksis in the back of her mind, as if his thoughts were hers, too, the ghost Drift between them so strong she can taste his food when he eats. It’s not normal for them to still be this closely connected, and the doctors are concerned, but she’s not.

She believes this is how she was meant to be.

 

Aleksis buys her another ring, for her little finger.

It says his name on it on the inside in block letters.  He has another one, for himself, with her name.

She looks at them and laughs, because he means it as a joke.

 _I’m you_ , the ring says, _you’re me_.

 

They don’t have sex for weeks after their eighteen-hour Drift.  They can’t, really physically can’t, because when they’re _this_ closely connected through their heads, it’s not like the aftereffects of their patrols, it’s like forgetting who they are again. And they’re all right with forgetting who they are, with losing their identities for a little while, but it makes it difficult to actually _perform_.

Sasha keeps thinking she has a cock. Aleksis keeps missing her mouth when he kisses her because he expects it to be somewhere else. They both are confused by each other’s chests and after Sasha nearly bites off his dick because she forgets it’s there, even though she has it in her mouth, they decide this isn’t the best idea in the world just now.

So they don’t.

It’s not a hardship. They’re close enough already.

 

By the time their heads have separated a little—enough to risk another Drift—they are itching to get back in the saddle, unhappy with nearly a month of boredom. Echo Sabre is on loan to Vladivostok and covering some of their shifts, because with Nova Hyperion down for the count—neither pilot dead, but both unfit for duty; they’d fallen out of the Drift when An Yuna had passed out from the pain of her circuitry burns and Pang So-Yi had triggered the damaged escape mechanism, resulting in severe head trauma for both of them as the pods jettisoned incorrectly—and Cherno Alpha grounded while the Kaidonovskies remember how to be two separate people again, the coast is the least secure it’s been in years.

They do their patrol. They come back. It’s like doing the whole thing all over again.

 

Sparring on the mats, Aleksis forgets that his wife’s height is a foot less than what the part of him that thinks he’s her believes it is, and a strike that’s supposed to catch her in the shoulders swings, instead, for her head.

She blocks for the shoulders, knowing where he intends it to go—because this is never a fight for them, only ever a dance, carefully coordinated—and his staff slams into her face. Her nose is pouring blood over the mats while he drops to his knees next to her, picking her up off the ground.

They don’t spar again. He refuses.

“I will never hurt you this way again,” he says when they’ve splinted her nose, voice quiet and deadly serious.

 

The connection doesn’t go away.

But they get much better at hiding it.

Every time Sasha gets confused about who she is, she twists the ring on her finger and feels the points of the K in her flesh and remembers: not Aleksis.  _Sasha_. She turns _Sasha_ into an image in her head, and every time she thinks _I am Sasha_ she solidifies into her body a little more, thinking of it.  She knows he’s doing the same thing, without even the Drift.  They don’t need the Drift anymore to drift, not really, they can do it looking at each other across the room, practically.

Cherno Alpha shifts in her sleep, in her spot in the bay, when they don’t think hard enough about being two people.

The PPDC denies all rumours of this nature.

The ghost Drift doesn’t exist.

Jaegers only move with pilots in them.

 

The Kaidonovskys never really stop being one person.

But they manage to remember they have two bodies again, at least.  Stop having that odd dysmorphic feeling, except for a few minutes right after every Drift, remember where all their body parts are supposed to be again.

They could fight again—but they don’t, instead they dance, like they used to do in the clubs. Then they start learning other ways to dance.  They work their way through as many different forms of ballroom as they can stomach before they move onto jazz and then hiphop.

As a last-ditch effort to get some good press, the PPDC releases several clips of them dancing to the internet, and they become a sensation for a few weeks.

The Russian government asks them to learn some traditional styles, for publicity.

And they figure, why not?

 

In the middle of the night the alarm rings, and Sasha and Aleksis rise in perfect unison, her from his chest, him from the bed.

Category III. in the Queen Charlotte Sound.

They strap on their boots together, throw on their clothes.

Aleksis braids her hair up quick and dirty, pins it to the back of her head, and they’re out the door, sprinting with their footsteps in perfect harmony to Cherno’s conn-pod for launch.

 

After the kaiju that wouldn’t fucking die, which is now known ironically throughout the world as _Lazarus_ , which was not its PPDC code name, but rather a trend started by one of the cults surrounding the things, a Cat. III. in the Queen Charlotte Sound is child’s play.

They don’t quite break the fastest kill record—they can’t actually move Cherno that fast—but they get close, with two blows and a bolt of electricity straight through the brain to take down the monster.

They’re back in the bay an hour and a half after launch.

 

The PPDC sells them to the Russian government for something big not long after that. Landing rights and something else, fueling, maybe, they don’t care.  They pack their bags.  They say goodbye to the Shatterdome.  Visit An Yuna and Pang So-Yi in the hospital they’ve been moved to.

Go back to Moscow, to the little apartment they never sold.

Sasha gets her cat back, even though it doesn’t really remember her.  She goes back to wearing her heels every day, something she hadn’t been able to do because of uniform regulations.

Aleksis still braids her hair in the mornings.

They get one of Aleksis’ brothers, who is a priest, to marry them properly, just say the words to make it official, although they have no parties or ceremonies.

It was time.

The Jaeger program was never their saving grace.  It was only ever a job.  Through and through, they are Rangers, but not being Rangers doesn’t make either of them feel lost. Nothing can ever make them feel lost while they’re both still alive.

So they wait for the end of the world together.

 

At 4:19 in the morning Aleksis wakes to the buzz of his phone across the room and gently extricates himself from his wife, leaves her sleeping in the bed.

It’s Stacker Pentecost.

“Yes?” he says, voice rough with sleep, as he walks outside to make sure he doesn’t wake Sasha.

(It’s too late. She probably woke the moment he did. She leans against the doorframe and listens.)

“I need your help.”

“Anything,” he replies, and knows Sasha would have said the same thing, because he can hear it in her head.

Stacker Pentecost wants a nuclear bomb and he wants Cherno Alpha.

Sasha shrugs, and he conveys their answer.

It’s doable.

 

It turns out he’s already asked for the bomb and been turned down because the Russians don’t exactly sell nuclear weapons to anyone, so their first order of business is arguing with the government, because for them, the heroes of the Siberian wall, the government is more likely to say yes.

So Sasha gets the contacts off him and shows up in a white blouse and a red pencil skirt and six-inch stilettos, because this is how she dresses when she wants something from a man who doesn’t know any better, and she’s hard to refuse when she really wants something. Aleksis stands near the door of the office while she lays out what she wants, and when they still refuse, he chimes in with his line.

“Well, we can always ask the Americans.”

Sasha smiles, politely, but with sharp teeth behind it, and watches the man’s face flash with seventy years of Russian-American tension as she gets up to leave.

So Stacker gets his bomb. For free.

And they get Cherno back.

 

They walk her down the coast from Vladivostok to Hong Kong, because they can.  Because they like to Drift.  Because they’re excellent at it.

Dock her in the bay next to Crimson Typhoon and step out of her conn-pod into the Wei Tang triplets, who scoff at their music like they have any right to judge it. Sasha bares her teeth at them and snaps like the wolf she’s capable of being.

Aleksis catches one pair of black eyes over her shoulder and shakes his head quietly.

So no fight starts.

Instead, one of them spins a basketball on his finger and says, in English, which is the only language they share, “Want to play?”

“Find us a third and we will,” Sasha says, and walks out of the room.

He follows her.

He always does.

 

When Striker Eureka arrives, with Hansens in tow, the three teams all sort of reach an easy accord, because this isn’t the first mission they’ve run together.

The Wei Tang brothers turn Chuck Hansen into their third for basketball and then proceed to grind them into the floor because none of the three of them have ever played basketball before, and Chuck has no idea what the two of them are doing because they don’t have to telegraph it for each other.

It gets the younger Hansen laughing, which, frankly, Sasha was not sure was even possible before now.

 

Aleksis sits next to her in the mess and Tendo Choi slides in across from them with a couple of techs in tow.  “So which one of you is which?” the woman to his left says.  They haven’t gotten this question for a few years, because they’re famous enough in Russia that everyone knows.  The rest of the world, though, just knows their names and faces and their Jaeger, not which name to attach to which person.

“Aleksis,” Tendo answers, pointing to him, “and Sasha,” pointing to her.

In unison, the two of them pull off the rings on their little fingers and flash the names at them, just to watch him pull back, surprised and confused, before Sasha laughs, harsh and loud, and says, “It doesn’t matter which of us is which.”

 

When the American arrives, they have no idea who he is at first, just walk by him and Stacker and Mako as the three of them cross the ‘dome towards Hercules.

“Raleigh Becket,” one of the triplets supplies, and Sasha remembers, Gipsy Danger. Mako’s pet project that’s sitting in one of the Jaeger bays.  She never paid much attention to him while he was piloting—has never paid much attention to any pilot who wasn’t in her class or in her ‘dome.  She vaguely remembers his brother because of some press incident he’d been involved in that she’d found passingly amusing.

If he can jockey, she figures, he can jockey.

If not?

They’re all going to die anyway.

 

They go to Raleigh Becket’s compatibility trials, because they want to see what he can do. The Wei Tangs are right there next to them, even though the five of them are not friendly, even if they’re not exactly unfriendly.

“Not good enough,” one of them says.

“No,” Sasha agrees.

Aleksis stays silent.

She can talk for him, he doesn’t care.

He gets the pleasure of watching her smile widen when Mako Mori steps onto the mat. Can feel her thinking, _show him what you’re made of, **myshka**_.

 

The Wei Tangs don’t like Raleigh Becket.  Or, more accurately, they don’t trust him.  The five of them are playing a two-team card game in the mess when he walks by, and all three of them fix their eyes to him, narrowing them, and don’t stop narrowing them until he’s gone.

And yes, after that failure of a test Drift, Sasha can understand.

He’s not good enough for Mako Mori.

And Gipsy Danger is not good enough for a bomb run to the Breach.

But this isn’t her decision.

It’s Stacker Pentecost’s.

And she trusts him, even though she doesn’t trust the Becket boy with his pretty smile and his big blue All-American eyes.

 

Aleksis kisses his wife on the back of the neck as he’s taking her braids down, running his fingers gently through them until they come loose and her hair—down to her shoulderblades, now—falls wavy against her back.

“I am beginning to wonder,” she tells him, tone of voice so unserious that he just smiles into the nape of her neck.  “If you remember how to speak.”

He doesn’t reply, just kisses her again, gentle.

Her neck scrapes red with his beard, and she turns around in his lap and kisses him properly. “Will I be your voice forever?”

“Until I make you lose yours crying my name,” he tells her, and lifts her to toss her onto the bed, which makes her laugh.

“There are porn actors with better lines than this, _krasavets_.”

But he makes good on it.

 

The two of them take a walk in the middle of the night and come across Hercules Hansen and Stacker Pentecost on the railing of the bay, staring at Gipsy Danger.

Crossing to stand next to them, Sasha takes count: they are the only four remaining members of the class of 2015.  All but two of the others are dead of cancer or kaiju.  The other two are one of Tacit Ronin’s pilots, dead of suicide, and Scott Hansen, who is or is not alive, it’s anyone’s guess.

All four of them are still wearing Scott’s ring on their hands.

Left, for all three of the men, right, for Sasha.  Stacker’s rests on his ring finger like a wedding band.

Soon, probably, all of them will be dead.

Kaiju, or cancer.

 

There are two kaiju converging on Hong Kong and the two of them throw on their drivesuits and sprint across the bay to Cherno.  Sasha stops to press a kiss to the metal foot of their Jaeger, leaving behind a bright red lipstick print, and it strikes Aleksis that this ought to have been the symbol of Cherno Alpha, this lipstick print, not the skull that rests on the shoulders of their jackets.

“Why’d you do that,” Chuck Hansen asks as they take the lifts up to the conn-pods, like he can’t escape his own curiosity.

“Kissing my weapon for good luck,” she replies shortly, already gravitating towards Aleksis and his tendency for wordlessness.  When Chuck grimaces, Aleksis expects him to say something about superstition and bullshit, but instead it’s something less expected.

“Jaeger’s not a weapon, it’s the pilots.  Pilots’re the weapon, if anything.”

The flash of rage that touches him through the ghost Drift is all for Hercules, for letting his boy grow up thinking this.

 

She kisses him before they walk into the conn-pod, the first kiss they’ve had in public since the one after their first kill.  He started that one, it’s only fair that she start this one.  “What, am I your weapon now?” he asks, so quiet only she can hear it, and in Russian besides, with mirth in his voice.

“No,” she tells him as they step into the conn-pod.  “You’re my husband.”

Their Drift is so close to a hundred percent synchronicity these days that there’s hardly any point in saying anything more than that once they’re in it.

Cherno drops for battle.

 _Aleksis_ and _Sasha_ Kaidonovsky stop existing an hour before they die.

It’s one person Leatherback crushes in the bay.

**Author's Note:**

> 1.) 'sasha' is a nickname for 'aleksandra' so i used that for the forces of evil  
> 2.) this is largely full of hc. see: mako mori's nipple piercing  
> 3.) i accidentally fell in love with the kaidonovskys  
> 4.) the inspiration for this was this quote from 'fifteen ways to stay alive': 'wear chapstick when kissing the bomb'  
> 5.) loosely, this alternates paragraphs between aleksis and sasha, but sometimes it got a little fuzzy. AS IT SHOULD.  
> 6.) i noticed while watching some scenes while writing this that while aleksis and sasha both have a hand full of rings, herc and stacker are both also sporting rings. since stacker isn't married and herc's is on his middle finger i figured they weren't wedding rings, so i was like yo what if


End file.
